Why do you have criteria for becoming an official Transition Initiative?

We’ve introduced this formal approach to registering Transition Initiatives for several key reasons:

To make sure that communities have a suitable group with the right mindset of people that understand what the process entails.

To make sure that while we actively nurture embryonic projects, we promote to "official" status only those communities that are ready to move through the process and that we can support. This status confers additional levels of support from us, such as advice, recommended speakers, training programs, and web site support.

We need to know what US-based Transition Initiatives are doing in order to coordinate programs (such as sharing of experiences and best practices between groups, or working on combined funding bids) and to be confident that together we can support and they deliver against such programs.

The communities that have gone through this initial formal process have agreed that it has enhanced their capacity to build a robust and well-supported initiative.